Spielregeln der Demokratie

the-zeitgeist-movement:

futurejournalismproject:

Frederic Filloux says Piracy is a big part of the digital ecosystem, and its role is both revered and ridiculed:

 

In October 2003, Wired ran this interesting piece about a company specialized in tracking entertainment contents over the internet. BigChampagne, located in Beverly Hills, is for the digital era what Billboard magazine was in the analog world. Except that BigChampagne is essentially tracking illegal contents that circulates on the web. It does so with incredible precision by matching IP numbers and zip code, finding out what’s hot on peer-to-peer networks. In his Wired piece, Jeff Howe explains:

BigChampagne’s clients can pull up information about popularity and market share (what percentage of file-sharers have a given song). They can also drill down into specific markets - to see, for example, that 38.35 percent of file-sharers in Omaha, Nebraska, have a song from the new 50 Cent album.

No wonder some clients pay BigChampagne up to $40,000 a month for such data. They  use BigChampagne’s valuable intelligence to apply gentle pressure on local radio station to air the very tunes favored by downloaders. For a long time, illegal file-sharing has been a powerful market and promotional tool for the music industry.

Piracy is still a problem, especially for software giants like Microsoft. Filloux points out that in China, so rampant is the problem of digital piracy for the company, that Microsoft sales are the same there as in the Netherlands, a country with just 16 million people—many of whom must be paying full fare for computer programs.

 At the pay rates of Chinese workers, they could never afford a legitimate copy of Windows anyway. So software giants completely overlook that fact.